Asset Management: Rules for Enhancing Resilience

Higher efficiency and increased productivity of transportation infrastructure constitute major challenges that asset management (AM) has to deal with. This trend is also enhanced by the current economic recession and as a result innovative cost-effective and environment friendly solutions attract the attention of European ministries of transport and National Infrastructure Authorities (NIAs). Capitalizing upon communication capabilities, connectivity between hinterland and logistics facilities could be achieved in an efficient way gaining economic savings and benefits. Technological solutions allow participation and communication of both internal and external operations among terminals and logistics facilities. These solutions integrate data from different systems and applications, developing a multimodal environment. Moreover, modern technology supports information spread into different platforms almost dynamically. AM exploits this information and data provided by information management and utilize training and awareness activities to define proper corrective actions. These actions should be taken when monitoring indicates that there is a deviation from an established critical limit. This paper presents a comprehensive framework on AM of transportation networks that enhances resilience planning. The proposed framework aims to address the complexity of decision making that NIAs and ministries face at a strategic and policy level. It is based on an evolutionary scheme that favors the increased collaboration among stakeholders developing synergies even between competitors. It deals with the entire transportation system holistically and promotes a fully functional transportation network assigning processes at a cross-modal and cross-border level to achieve a high-level network optimization. Resilience planning is also enhanced to ensure that the network can operate with maximum efficiency at any stage and to identify alternate routes or modes of transport after breakdowns.